"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

I am currently translating into English a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk, and though it might be useful to share one or two things I have learnt from it. Today, a word about prayer of intercession. All of us who pray know what it is to pray for others, from the most intimate prayer for a loved one to the prière universelle that is part of every Mass and other church services. And all of us know, and grieve at, the fact that so many of those prayers seem to go unheard or at any rate unfulfilled. We know that our reaction must be “Thy will be done,” but we still wonder at that will and at what look like its vagaries. 

My Carthusian suggests we look at this differently. First, we should cease to imagine intercessory prayer as an attempt to influence, push or divert the Lord, to change His mind, to alter what He was originally going to do. All prayer, he says, is originally God’s initiative. St Paul says that it is the Spirit that prays in us; and so in the fact that at this moment I am praying for X I am aligning myself with God’s initiative. 

Secondly, just as the air around us is filled with waves of all kinds that we do not perceive unless we have a receiver and turn it on, so that same air is filled with prayers, a kind of quærosphere. God hears all prayer, but it must also be received by the beneficiary – a fact which, in the name of love and its necessary liberty, God cannot guarantee. 

Thirdly, as Huck Finn found and as I have mentioned several times in these posts, it is no use praying for fishhooks. God does not micromanage His creation. The extreme conclusion from this is that all we can truly pray for, concerning someone else, concerning X, is X’s salvation. And that prayer’s efficacy depends on whether X’s receiver for such prayers is turned on. If it is, the prayer will be granted. 

To add a point of my own: what about the prayers for healing and so on? Apart from the fact that God does not micromanage Creation, I am convinced that they are nevertheless effective in a certain way, especially if the beneficiaries know that they are prayed for. I believe that such prayer creates a small or large tidal flow of spiritual support that in itself helps the healing process.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that the only way prayer can be effective is if it is a) for oneself, b) pious, and c) insistent. I see the point of this, and b) and c) are important; but a) should not be abandoned, even in the face of what sometimes seems to be a great and uncaring silence. Intercessory prayer, after all, is a genuine form of loving. Perhaps for a) we should substitute “with our eyes open,” clear-headedly, intelligently and without illusion. Then b) piously: we should put our whole hearts into it, in hope and trust; and c) insistently: like the widow in Jesus’ parable who importuned the unjust judge till he gave her what she wanted just to get rid of her, God smilingly allows us to bother him.